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CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL ESSAYS VOLUME 2
CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL ESSAYS VOLUME 2 THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY CONTENTS OF VOLUME II
FOREIGN HISTORY
MACHIAVELLI
RANKE'S HISTORY OF THE POPES
WAR OF THE SPANISH SUCCESSION
FREDERIC THE GREAT
POLITICAL CONTROVERSY
SOUTHEY'S COLLOQUIES
CIVIL DISABILTIES OF THE JEWS
GLADSTONE ON CHURCH AND STATE
LITERARY CRITICISMS
BACON
JOHN BUNYAN
DRAMATISTS OF THE RESTORATION
ADDISON
SAMUEL JOHNSON
MADAME D'ARBLAY
BYRON
MONTGOMERY
INDEX
MACHIAVELLI
(March 1827)
Oeuvres completes de MACHIAVEL traduites par J. V. PERIER Paris:
1825.
Those who have attended to the practice of our literary tribunal
are well aware that by means of certain legal fictions similar
to those of Westminster Hall we are frequently enabled to take
cognisance of cases lying beyond the sphere of our original
jurisdiction. We need hardly say therefore that in the present
instance M. Perier is merely a Richard Roe who will not be
mentioned in any subsequent stage of the proceedings and whose
name is used for the sole purpose of bringing Machiavelli into
court.
We doubt whether any name in literary history be so generally
odious as that of the man whose character and writings we now
propose to consider. The terms in which he is commonly described
would seem to import that he was the Tempter the Evil Principle
the discoverer of ambition and revenge the original inventor of
perjury and that before the publication of his fatal Prince
there had never been a hypocrite a tyrant or a traitor a
simulated virtue or a convenient crime. One writer gravely
assures us that Maurice of Saxony learned all his fraudulent
policy from that execrable volume. Another remarks that since it
was translated into Turkish the Sultans have been more addicted
than formerly to the custom of strangling their brothers. Lord
Lyttelton charges the poor Florentine with the manifold treasons
of the house of Guise and with the massacre of St. Bartholomew.
Several authors have hinted that the Gunpowder Plot is to be
primarily attributed to his doctrines and seem to think that his
effigy ought to be substituted for that of Guy Faux in those
processions by which the ingenious youth of England annually
commemorate the preservation of the Three Estates. The Church of
Rome has pronounced his works accursed things. Nor have our own
countrymen been backward in testifying their opinion of his
merits. Out of his surname they have coined an epithet for a
knave and out of his Christian name a synonym for the Devil.
[Nick Machiavel had ne'er a trick
Tho' he gave his name to our old Nick.
Hudibras Part iii. Canto i.
But we believe there is a schism on this subject among the
antiquarians.]
It is indeed scarcely possible for any person not well
acquainted with the history and literature of Italy to read
without horror and amazement the celebrated treatise which has
brought so much obloquy on the name of Machiavelli. Such a
display of wickedness naked yet not ashamed such cool
judicious scientific atrocity seemed rather to belong to a
fiend than to the most depraved of men. Principles which the most
hardened ruffian would scarcely hint to his most trusted
accomplice or avow without the disguise of some palliating
sophism even to his own mind are professed without the
slightest circumlocution and assumed as the fundamental axioms
of all political science.
It is not strange that ordinary readers should regard the author
of such a book as the most depraved and shameless of human
beings. Wise men however have always been inclined to look with
great suspicion on the angels and daemons of the multitude: and
in the present instance several circumstances have led even
superficial observers to question the justice of the vulgar
decision. It is notorious that Machiavelli was through life a
zealous republican. In the same year in which he composed his
manual of King-craft he suffered imprisonment and torture in the
cause of public liberty. It seems inconceivable that the martyr
of freedom should have designedly acted as the apostle of
tyranny. Several eminent writers have therefore endeavoured to
detect in this unfortunate performance some concealed meaning
more consistent with the character and conduct of the author than
that which appears at the first glance.
One hypothesis is that Machiavelli intended to practise on the
young Lorenzo de Medici a fraud similar to that which Sunderland
is said to have employed against our James the Second and that
he urged his pupil to violent and perfidious measures as the
surest means of accelerating the moment of deliverance and
revenge. Another supposition which Lord Bacon seems to
countenance is that the treatise was merely a piece of grave
irony intended to warn nations against the arts of ambitious
men. It would be easy to show that neither of these solutions is
consistent with many passages in The Prince itself. But the most
decisive refutation is that which is furnished by the other works
of Machiavelli. In all the writings which he gave to the public
and in all those which the research of editors has in the course
of three centuries discovered in his Comedies designed for the
entertainment of the multitude in his Comments on Livy intended
for the perusal of the most enthusiastic patriots of Florence in
his History inscribed to one of the most amiable and estimable
of the Popes in his public despatches in his private memoranda
the same obliquity of moral principle for which The Prince is so
severely censured is more or less discernible. We doubt whether
it would be possible to find in all the many volumes of his
compositions a single expression indicating that dissimulation
and treachery had ever struck him as discreditable.
After this it may seem ridiculous to say that we are acquainted
with few writings which exhibit so much elevation of sentiment
so pure and warm a zeal for the public good or so just a view of
the duties and rights of citizens as those of Machiavelli. Yet
so it is. And even from The Prince itself we could select many
passages in support of this remark. To a reader of our age and
country this inconsistency is at first perfectly bewildering.
The whole man seems to be an enigma a grotesque assemblage of
incongruous qualities selfishness and generosity cruelty and
benevolence craft and simplicity abject villainy and romantic
heroism. One sentence is such as a veteran diplomatist would
scarcely write in cipher for the direction of his most
confidential spy; the next seems to be extracted from a theme
composed by an ardent schoolboy on the death of Leonidas. An act
of dexterous perfidy and an act of patriotic self-devotion call
forth the same kind and the same degree of respectful admiration.
The moral sensibility of the writer seems at once to be morbidly
obtuse and morbidly acute. Two characters altogether dissimilar
are united in him. They are not merely joined but interwoven.
They are the warp and the woof of his mind; and their
combination like that of the variegated threads in shot silk
gives to the whole texture a glancing and ever-changing
appearance. The explanation might have been easy if he had been
a very weak or a very affected man. But he was evidently neither
the one nor the other. His works prove beyond all contradiction
that his understanding was strong his taste pure and his sense
of the ridiculous exquisitely keen.
This is strange: and yet the strangest is behind. There is no
reason whatever to think that those amongst whom he lived saw
anything shocking or incongruous in his writings. Abundant proofs
remain of the high estimation in which both his works and his
person were held by the most respectable among his
contemporaries. Clement the Seventh patronised the publication of
those very books which the Council of Trent in the following
generation pronounced unfit for the perusal of Christians. Some
members of the democratical party censured the Secretary for
dedicating The Prince to a patron who bore the unpopular name of
Medici. But to those immoral doctrines which have since called
forth such severe reprehensions no exception appears to have been
taken. The cry against them was first raised beyond the Alps and
seems to have been heard with amazement in Italy. The earliest
assailant as far as we are aware was a countryman of our own
Cardinal Pole. The author of the Anti-Machiavelli was a French
Protestant.
It is therefore in the state of moral feeling among the
Italians of those times that we must seek for the real
explanation of what seems most mysterious in the life and
writings of this remarkable man. As this is a subject which
suggests many interesting considerations both political and
metaphysical we shall make no apology for discussing it at some
length.
During the gloomy and disastrous centuries which followed the
downfall of the Roman Empire Italy had preserved in a far
greater degree than any other part of Western Europe the traces
of ancient civilisation. The night which descended upon her was
the night of an Arctic summer. The dawn began to reappear before
the last reflection of the preceding sunset had faded from the
horizon. It was in the time of the French Merovingians and of the
Saxon Heptarchy that ignorance and ferocity seemed to have done
their worst. Yet even then the Neapolitan provinces recognising
the authority of the Eastern Empire preserved something of
Eastern knowledge and refinement. Rome protected by the sacred
character of her Pontiffs enjoyed at least comparative security
and repose Even in those regions where the sanguinary Lombards
had fixed their monarchy there was incomparably more of wealth
of information of physical comfort and of social order than
could be found in Gaul Britain or Germany.
That which most distinguished Italy from the neighbouring
countries was the importance which the population of the towns
at a very early period began to acquire. Some cities had been
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